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Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

anders.unix.se

121–130 of 259 posts

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#121

RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.

Most screenshots for these well known guys are quite boring. Coincidence? I think if you want to be good at something you need focus.

The more 'h4ck3r' screenshot you have with useless toys at /r/unixporn in Reddit, the less you actually know about computers.

Most i3 setups there are for showoff; cwm has better defaults and conmuting between tags it's far more manageable than fighting with tiles where often the window resolutions are either useless or scramble your content.

Also most fluxbox or *box users will have far better setups than i3 ones because they use their actual setups to do actual stuff instead of posting screenshots.

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#122

RMS to me is really a curious case. He doesn't know how to install GNU+Linux and relies on others to do it. He doesn't know how to take a screenshot, and I remember reading other snippets from him about not knowing how to perform other basic tasks.

See also: Knuth. Literally wrote the book on algorithms, but barely is able to do more than open a window in FVWM.

FVWM setups can be really complex. Ditto with (c)twm. Once you are free to choose your windows geometry and keybindings, everything it's just either bloat or severely restricted.

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#123

RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.

I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and jus…

You sucked up to an autist, what did you think was going to happen? That's like trying to use Disney Dollars at Universal.

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded people don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft. I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways.…

This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

And the world, people as a mob, will try its best to punish that person for daring to be different. The nail that sticks out gets beaten.

RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and jus…

Did he print those out on a printer with closed source software? (;->

Why? Nroff/troff is literally designed to be printed with CUPS or Postscript etc etc etc

You can also literally cat > /dev/printer

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#127
post #118

RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.

fbgrab it's a thing. Then convert the resulting image to png.

Not everyone likes or use framebuffer. It's actually kinda 'new', as most classical linux text mode was done without it.

I also have no idea how to make screenshots of text terminal (as f1-f12 with no fb)

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I…

what's difficult about it? I have auto complete, LSP, format on save for may languages, fuzzy finding. my neovim config file is 355 lines, with comments and line breaks.

Normal, good editors are great already with 0 line config. That's the whole point.

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#129

RMS could have taken a photo of his screen, or done something cheeky like dump his screen to a padded ASCII text file and submitted that. Stick in the mud.

I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him. I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and jus…

I met RMS at a lunch in his honor at an Edinburgh vegetarian restaurant with very high ranking scholars/academics present, after an invited talk of his. Everyone was talking, eating, drinking and having a good time, whereas he was sitting at the head of the table doing email on his ThinkPad (yes, in text mode).

So I walked up, I introduced myself and asked a question about the freedom of _data_ versus the freedom of _software_, and without looking up to me he said "I don't do smalltalk". So I got back to my seat and told my "story" to my immediate neighbors, who were keen to learn what he'd said.

(He is much more constructive by email.)

Re: Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)

#130
post #83
post #8

I completely misread '2015' as '2025' and thought these were from this November rather than November 10 years ago. I couldn't believe so many people were still using what appeared to be Aqua-era OS X.

Aqua-era OS X is the best looking out of the box desktop environment in the entire history of computing, and given 1) the lack of interest everyone seems to have in the desktop these days and 2) the directions in which the few remaining contenders are headed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it remained that way for a long time. It’d be fun, as a side project, to build a pixel perfect replica of it (along with the core app…

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